Helen Keller: A Life

Helen Keller: A Life

Keller’s childhood has been the stuff of legend for nearly a century, but her adult life, as fleshed out in Helen Keller: A Life by Dorothy Herrmann, was also remarkable. Keller became an outspoken feminist and socialist, befriended Alexander Graham Bell and Mark Twain, and had an intensely symbiotic relationship with her famous teacher, Annie Sullivan, who was yin to Keller’s yang both in class and temperament. Except for its conspicuous neglect of Keller’s relationships with her younger brother and sister, this is a probing, unsentimental bio of the blind-deaf activist who both inspired a thousand tasteless jokes and revolutionized popular perceptions of the disabled. B+